A Reading of Book Ten of The Confessions
In the first nine books of The Confessions, Saint Augustine recalls and relates his life and his path to Christianity. Memory has enabled this recovery and articulation of his life. But Augustine asks more of memory. Can it show who he is, what he is, in what way he exists? Can Augustine, in conversation with memory, discover his self? Can he achieve his primary end and find God in or through memory? It is to answer these questions that Augustine turns his attention, in Book 10, from autobiography to the interrogation and elucidation of memory itself. He there proposes to “show not what I was, but what I now am and continue to be,” and thereby to determine whether and how the being that he is, human being, can recover, uncover, discover God himself. (10.4) In pursuing these questions, in dialogue with himself, in dialogue with memory, Augustine secures insights into the character and operation of memory, insights that stand independently of judgments of his success or failure in finding God . My aim in this paper is to relate the phenomenology of memory and self that emerges from Augustine’s investigations in Book 10 and to show its general value for understanding human being and knowing.
Memory is Augustine’s path to the knowledge he seeks, for memory enables questioning, answering, recognition, and understanding. Moreover, memory appears central both to any conception of self and to that being created in God's image, human being. Augustine’s interest in the mechanism of memory is not, to be sure, for the sake of scientific knowledge. Indeed, such a purpose, in isolation, would exemplify the empty and sterile curiosity which he brands "lust of the eyes." (10.35) Purpose aside, however, what Augustine produces is science broadly conceived, for his findings advance our understanding of memory and self, and they do so regardless of particular theological or religious commitments. Much like Martin Heidegger, in Being and Time, interrogated human being (Dasein) in order to understand being (Sein), so Augustine's questioning of memory in Confessions is an attempt to know God. Toward this end and along this path, Augustine produces a rich phenomenology of memory and self, one whose value extends to secular as well as religious understanding.
Augustine begins Book 10 by announcing his aim to know God, and to know how he knows God. “Let me know you, my known; let me know Thee even as I am known.” It is through confession that Augustine undertakes this search for the true self whose revelation will reveal truth, reveal God. In considering the value of making public such an account, for how will the public know that what he says is true, Augustine remarks that “to hear from you about themselves is simply to know themselves.” (10.3) Memory is thus posited as the seat of self, and knowledge of self seen as prerequisite to knowledge of God. Augustine must, then, engage in conversation with his self if he is to know himself and to thereby know God. He must remember his way to God if he is to both find God and understand the way of that finding.
Memory, then, becomes the key to knowledge, whether of objects, principles, or God himself. Augustine provides much straightforward description of memory’s operations and limitations. For highest knowledge, however, there is implicit appeal to metaphorical or analogical explanation, in which the human being is related to God as the image is to reality. This appeal may be recast as a transformation or extension of Socratic reflection: knowing oneself truly is to know God. As noted above, Augustine petitions God to “let me know Thee even as I am known [by Thee].” (10.1) God knows Augustine fully and as he really is, and it is such full and real knowledge that Augustine desires of God.
Just as Socrates was not content to examine human being through reflection on the wonders of nature, so Augustine is not content to know God through His works, the myriad and marvelous entities that constitute the world, excepting of course, at least provisionally, the work that is Augustine the inquirer. He must look away from material creation if he is to know God directly and unalloyed. His path is therefore an interior one. The Heidegger allusion is apt: one must understand Dasein (human being) in order to understand Sein (Being). So, if Augustine is to know God, he must first know himself. Indeed, it is via his self that he knows anything at all. And this avenue of the self is not one of pray and wait for God to present himself. Notably, the inquiry into memory, the confession of interior being, is, Augustine recounts, "hard labor inside myself, and I have become to myself a piece of difficult ground, not to be worked over without much sweat." (10.16) Here Augustine indicates both the magnitude of the undertaking and the means of its attempted execution, the close examination of oneself, of his own self. Difficult ground this human being-in-the-world, yet for Augustine ground that must be tilled if it is to yield self-understanding and knowledge of God.
Augustine is methodical in identifying memory as the viable source for knowledge of God. First he looks about the “gates of my senses” and asks the elements – earth, sun, stars, moon, heaven – what they know of God; the elements answer only “He made us.” Next he turns to himself and asks, “Who are you?” I am “a man . . . a body and a soul, the one exterior, the other interior.” (10.6) Which part is to be interrogated? Clearly, soul, for soul gives life to body and not the reverse, and it is soul that enables perception and makes sense of exteriority. Yet life and perception are shared as well by horses and mules, so Augustine must surpass these forces if he is to find God. (10.7) Ascending by degrees toward his Maker, Augustine reaches “the spacious fields and palaces of memory.” Memory is a treasure trove of all that can be made present to mind in any way, a storehouse of images, thoughts, beliefs, feelings, principles – spiritual representations of every type and stripe. Only what is “buried in forgetfulness” is not there. (10.8)
Memory answers to requests, often quickly, at times slowly, sometimes clearly, other times not so clearly. The power of recall increases with repetition. The storage of images, feelings, ideas is orderly and distinguishes among sources. We recall sounds separately from sights; evidence from one sense is retained independently of evidence from the others. But how is this possible? First, and obviously, memory does not have the actual sights and sounds in mind, but rather images or representations of these realities. The distinction between image and reality, or image and image source, is central to Augustine’s account. “What happens is that images of things perceived are there ready at hand for thought to recall.” (10.8) We retain in our memory images of sunsets, cities, friends, and countless other entities. Whatever the precise mechanism of this retention, it is images of these sensory objects which we retain in mind, not the objects themselves. Augustine too is among these stored images, present to himself as a congeries of all that he has perceived and experienced. “There too I encounter myself; I recall myself – what I have done, when and where I did it, and in what state of mind I was at the time.” And thus “I speak to myself, and, while I am speaking, the images of all the things that I am saying are present to my mind.” Indeed, absent this presence “I would not be able to speak of these things at all.” (10.8)
Yet memory, this “boundless subterranean shrine” that “belongs to my nature,” is beyond fathoming, and “I cannot grasp all that I am.” Memory is an enigma, for the mind which contains it “is not large enough to contain itself [memory].” In “great wonder” and “struck dumb with astonishment,” Augustine asks whether memory is “outside itself and not inside,” in which case “how can it fail to contain itself?” (10.8) He concludes that what is truly wondrous is not the great natural features of the world that most wonder at, but that we, through images, are able to speak of a world at all.
Memory contains a second category of entities – objects of study and learning; these, however, are present not as images but as actualities. (10.9) Sounds of speech, letters and symbols on a page, yes these we have as images. “But as to the things themselves that are signified by these sounds, I never approached them by any bodily sense.” From where, then, if not through the senses, did these objects enter into memory? From the expressions of a teacher or authority, perhaps? Augustine says not, for “when I learned them I was recognizing them in my own mind.” Present in mind but not in memory, or so buried in memory as to require suggestion or question to be unearthed? Yes, the latter, for otherwise “how was it that, when I heard them spoken, I recognized them and said: ‘That is right, that is true?’” (10.10) Learning is thus for Augustine, at least for non-material objects of attention, as it was for Plato in the Meno, a process of recollection. To learn without the aid of images but through direct inner perception means that “by the act of thought . . . we are collecting together things which the memory did contain, though in a disorganized and scattered way,” and in closely attending to them we make them familiar and ready to hand. (10.11) Augustine echoes the Meno once more, in noting that this act of attention and discovery is not a one-off proposition, but must be frequently repeated if once-hidden truths are to remain unhidden and accessible to conscious thought, that is, if they are to constitute knowledge.
It is no surprise that Augustine’s view of mathematics is Platonic as well, for the “principles and laws of numbers and dimensions” are facts present to mind and memory yet not via the paths of bodily sensation. Numbers are independent of color, smell, taste, sound, and touch. Their sounds or marks are of course sensory, but “the numbers by which we are able to count at all are not these marks nor their images.” Augustine’s appeal for the independent reality of numbers marks an implicit appeal for the reality of God, for he surely has God in mind when he speaks of numbers in terms of laughter and sorrow. “Anyone who cannot see them may laugh at me for talking of them, and, while he laughs, I shall be sorry for him.” (10.12)
Feelings too are present in memory. Mind contains memory and memory contains mind’s feelings. In memory, however, these feelings are experienced as memories and not as immediate affections of mind. This raises questions for the near synonymy of mind and memory that suffuses Augustine’s account. Since “we call memory itself mind . . . how is it that when I, being happy, remember my past sadness—so that the mind contains happiness and the memory contains sadness—the mind is happy because of the happiness in it, but the memory is not sad because of the sadness in it?” Moreover, in recalling to mind instances of any of the four categories of disturbance that characterize mind—desire, joy, fear, sorrow—“I myself feel no disturbance.” Augustine compares this tranquil recollection of disturbing affections to the rumination of a cow. The cow eats, chews its cud, then “eats again.” Augustine undergoes experiences, recollects them from memory, then attends to these memories once again. The analogy is imperfect, however, for the cow presumably tastes the food once eaten, while recalled memories do not carry their original affections, for one may recall a sad memory while being happy. Augustine concedes the apparent paradox, then observes how useful it is that whenever we use the words “sorrow” and “fear,” we do not feel sorrow or fear; otherwise, we would likely avoid using such words. Augustine proceeds to affirm the basis for the paradox, asserting that we could not talk about remembered feelings at all, “unless we could find within our memory not only the sounds of the words (according to images impressed upon it by the senses of the body) but also concepts of the things themselves, and we did not receive these concepts by the gateway of any bodily sense.” It was rather “the mind itself which, by the experience of its own passions, felt them” and either entrusted them to or finds them retained by the memory. (10.14)
Augustine next asks how these internally originating understandings, the “concepts of the things themselves,” are held and recalled. While “it is not easy to say whether this takes place by means of images or not,” Augustine presents analyses that support extension of the image-reality model of explanation beyond its (for him) unproblematic application to sensory objects. The easy account is that we have or know outer realities by having interior images of those realities. The tree stands on the lawn but is present as well within the observer. The tree is captured by the senses, and that perception, whatever the subsequent fate of the tree, stays with the observer. In short, the tree out there is the source of its presence in mind; this presence we call image. But does this model work for meaning-entities that do not arise from sense perception? In part yes, as shown by Augustine’s use of “image” to refer to conceptual as well as to sensible images. (10.15)
Augustine first rehearses the easy application: when I utter “stone” or “sun” when neither stone nor sun is present, their images arise in memory. Then he asks about interior phenomena and the means of their retention and recall. He has, for example, no headache, yet understands what he is saying in pronouncing the word “headache.” This pain, then, must be present in memory as image; otherwise “I should not know how to speak of it and, in any discussion, I should be unable to draw a distinction between it and pleasure.” (10.15) Similarly, one may be in good health, but to know that fact requires the presence in memory of the image of health; otherwise we could not speak at all of health or of illness. Numbers are different; they are present themselves in memory, and not present as images. Augustine names a number, and the number itself is present to him. Images too can be present as themselves. “I name the image of the sun, and this image is in my memory - not the image of the image but the image itself.” (10.15)
The presence of memory to itself and the presence of forgetfulness to memory are more perplexing questions. We say “memory” or we say “forgetfulness” and we know what we mean by the words; this recognition, like any other, can only take place in or via memory. But are these realities present to us via their images or directly in themselves? Augustine answers that “when I remember memory, memory itself is, through itself, present to itself.” Forgetfulness, however, cannot be directly present to memory, for its very essence is the privation of memory. (10.16) It therefore appears that forgetfulness must be present to memory as image and not as actuality; otherwise, what is remembered, forgetfulness, would be that which is the negation or cancellation of memory. But this explanation is also problematic, for remembering forgetfulness by way of its image still requires that forgetfulness itself be in some way present, since images require for their existence the actualities of which they are images.
Reaching impasse, Augustine reflects on the “hard labor inside myself” in attempting to fathom the interior operation of memory, as distinct from the relatively easy labor of examining, measuring, and recalling objects or relations of earth and heaven. And he finds this difficulty the more remarkable due to the nearness of the object of his inquiry. “It is I myself who remember, I, the mind. . . . Yet this force of my memory is incomprehensible to me, even though, without it, I should not be able to call myself myself.” Acknowledging the absurdity of remembering forgetfulness, he nevertheless concludes that “however incomprehensible and inexplicable, I am quite sure that I do remember this forgetfulness by which what we remember is effaced.” (10.16)
This very incomprehensibility moves Augustine to marvel at the nature and power of memory. “It is something terrifying, my God, a profound and infinite multiplicity; and this thing is the mind, and this thing is I myself.” (10.17) This ode to memory could well serve as an ode to God. In seeking to know God, Augustine deliberately looks toward what is most Godlike, toward what is most in the image of God. He does not pursue inferences from external signs of God’s presence but focuses on God within, on the interiority of human being, which manifests itself in or as memory. It is this proximity of memory to God that validates Augustine’s inquiry for philosophy as well as for theology. Augustine identifies his (non-material) self with memory and, concluding that he cannot find God without, turns to search within, within himself, within memory. What Augustine establishes is the necessity of self-knowledge to any further or different or bigger knowledge, whether of God (whatever the religion) or of Being (however conceived). Echoing the ancient injunction to know thyself, and echoing in the much later return to the self, to human being in the world, in existentialist thought, Augustine’s inquiry into the heart of humanness bridges the interests and insights of Socratic, humanistic, and religious philosophy.
Of course, for Augustine, knowledge of the self is explicitly for the sake of knowledge of God, and he reiterates this in dramatic fashion upon reaching the limits of understanding memory and the attendant recognition of the limits of his capacity to know God through appeal to memory. Augustine first rehearses what he has discovered: “The plains, caverns, and abysses of my memory are innumerable . . . and are innumerably full of innumerable kinds of things,” present either as images (of bodies), as things themselves (objects of learning), or as affections of the mind. And where does this leave him? “I fly here and I fly there; I dive down deep as I can, and I can find no end. So great is the force of memory, so great is the force of life in man who lives to die.” (10.17)
Augustine is thus moved to ask beyond memory, to petition for divine guidance: “What shall I do, you true life of mine, my God?” He answers himself that he “will go past this force of mine called memory . . . so that I may draw nearer to you.” Augustine pauses to offer a fig leaf of support to his decision to jettison memory, observing that “even beasts and birds have memory.” Yes, but as Augustine himself has overwhelmingly demonstrated, of a character scarcely analogous to the “terrifying, profound, and infinite multiplicity” that is human memory, that multiplicity which in fact constitutes Augustine the inquirer. This difference is not lost on him, for almost immediately upon vowing to “pass beyond memory to find you,” he turns again to memory to continue his quest to know God. “Oh where, where shall I find you . . . ? If I find you beyond my memory, I can have no memory of you. And how shall I find you if I do not remember you?” (10.17)
Augustine then renews his argument for the fruitfulness of memory, proceeding much as Socrates had earlier proceeded in addressing the paradox of memory in the Meno. First we are told a story. “The woman who had lost her groat [coin] sought for it with a light; but unless she had remembered it, she would not have found it. For when it was discovered, how could she have known whether it was the right one or not, if she had not remembered it?” (10.18) The woman obviously does know when she finds the coin. Indeed, in any search for an object lost to the senses, the object’s image likely remains in memory, enabling a cry of “eureka” upon espying the sought-for item. This recognition of course lies in the match between physical object and retained sensory image, the easy case of memory; but “when the memory itself loses something, as happens when we forget a thing and try to recollect it, where can we possibly look for it except in the memory?” (10.19)
With this question, Augustine raises again the paradox of memory. How can I remember what I have forgotten, when that which is forgotten is, by definition, lost to memory? Augustine first notes the commonplace that we do often recall what we consider forgotten. For example, we have all forgotten a person’s name but can still identify it from a recited list of names. Such recognition-events require the presence in memory of the actuality that is recognized; otherwise, there is no basis whatsoever for any re-cognition. No matter that we remember what we had forgotten only “after being reminded of it by someone else, the recognition still comes from the memory.” Moreover, “we do not accept it as though it were something new; instead we agree that this is what it was because we remember it to be so.” (10.19)
Accepting as fact the remembrance of the forgotten, Augustine resolves the apparent paradox by appeal to a distinction or division within mind or memory, an anticipation of the centuries later discovery or conception of the unconscious. In contemporary terms, what is lost to consciousness is not necessarily lost to memory. Memories are present but not consciously so, for they may be present pre-consciously, sub-consciously, or un-consciously. Deeply seated, obscured, hidden, yes, but not altogether unavailable; dormant but open to wakening by signals or inquiries. In Augustine’s words, “this could be the solution: the whole thing had not slipped from our memory; part of it was retained and by means of this part the other part was sought for.” In further explaining this recall of the forgotten or hidden, he imputes the highest value yet to memory, ostensibly as means of insight into self but implicitly as means of access to God. There is such recollection “because the memory realized that it was not carrying along with it the totality which it was used to and, going unevenly, as it were, through the loss of something to which it was accustomed, eagerly demanded the restoration of what was lacking.” (10.19)
In this expressive, animated, even yearning description of the operation of recollection, Augustine appears to grant independent life and agency to memory, thus deepening the analogy to God in the surpassing or transcending that remembrance is suggested to be. Memory surpasses itself in remembering memories, in recalling what is forgotten, in finding what is hidden even from consciousness. God is, of course, for Augustine all-surpassing, all transcending, and yet is revealed to finite being in much the way memory reveals itself in the process of remembering. Augustine’s long interrogation of memory has thus led him to a renewed confidence in the power of memory to reveal or know God. This is so for two reasons, one explicit and the overt subject of most of Augustine’s analysis, the other implicit in, and implicitly grounding, much of that analysis. Of course, this distinction between implicit and overt subjects of attention ultimately collapses, since Augustine identifies self with memory or mind. Still, along the way, the distinction does useful work in framing Augustine’s inquiry.
Regarding what is implicit in Augustine’s discussion of memory, we are led to see that memory can reveal God because it is the human aspect or entity that is most like God. Each is hidden but in part known, the ultimate operations of each are unfathomable, and each serves to ground and make possible knowing (in the case of memory) or being itself (in the case of God). That memory is necessary for human knowing and knowledge pervades Augustine’s analyses. That God is ultimate ground of being and knowing is of course assumed throughout the writings. The value of Augustine’s insights into memory obtain, whether one accepts his view that memory is God’s image in some way incarnate in human being, whether one agrees with his argument for transcendent (but non-Christian) reality, even whether one holds memory or mind itself to be the ultimate or independent locus or actuality of human reality and knowing.
In this context, particularly in viewing memory as image of God, it is instructive to recall Augustine’s earlier identification of himself with memory or mind, and his choice of the interior path to knowledge of God. This path has a twofold character. In looking within and questioning himself in his search for knowledge of God, Augustine is simultaneously inquiring into the divinity within himself, the reflected divinity that constitutes his self. Moreover, this inquiry into himself as image of God is equally inquiry into memory itself, a searching look by Augustine for knowledge of his own-most actuality. Memory, then, the actuality of selfhood, is for Augustine the created thing most in God's image, for God is (for Augustine) knowledge or truth, and human memory is the ground that makes human knowledge at all possible. Recall Augustine’s observation that, in the act of remembering memory, “memory itself is, through itself, present to itself.” (10.16) In this presence to itself, memory knows itself directly and not via its reflected image in the images or products of its operations. In this direct knowing, memory knows itself more truly, knows itself as image of God or, more secularly, as image of transcendent truth. Self-knowing memory is thus nearer to or more like God, whose being is posited to constitute absolute self-knowing. For Augustine, it would appear, human self-knowledge mimics or approximates to divine knowledge, and offers a prospect of being in or with God in the act of knowing self as aspect of God, aspect of truth.
Augustine’s interior search for God may be grounded in a kinship between self and God, but his primary attention to memory is devoted to uncovering and making explicit the operation or mechanism of memory, how we remember and what we remember. This mechanism is not the mechanism of naturalism, but rather a phenomenology of the capacity and ways of memory to uncover, find, or come to know even that which is beyond experience, including the self or memory itself.
In Book 10 of The Confessions Augustine has traced in memory the path to God. This tracing has been within himself, as memory is most his self. Even Augustine’s consideration of looking without and to the natural world as pathway to God backs up to and depends on his presence or existence as memory; otherwise there would be neither world-analyses nor self-inquiries. Absent memory, there is no concept of self, no concepts at all, and human knowledge is itself impossible. Any inquiring then, whether characterized as inward or outward, is necessarily a looking into memory, for the phenomenon of the self (including the inquiring self) is itself only accessible as memory. Thus, to search for God, for knowledge of God, is necessarily to search within memory. In seeking God in and through dialogue with himself, Augustine uncovers and illuminates the character and inter-workings of human memory.
Bibliography
Warner, Rex, trans. The Confessions of St. Augustine. New York: New American Library, 1963. References in text are parenthetical by book and chapter. Book X is cited as (10.1).
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